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Down the Rabbit Hole of GPU error Diagnosis

I have been using an old Radeon HD6750 for a while now with few problems [Sytem: Athlon 2 x4 640; mobo: mcp6m-m3 (v7)]. I generally play a few games like League of Legends and some RTS's . I just about managed to get Alien Isolation to work with it which was a pleasant surprise!

Recently a friend donated me his Nvidia Geforce GTX760. To my knowledge he has never had any issues with it other than mention something about some heat 'issues' and the need for good cooling. After installing the card I noticed the power plugs required 8 sockets and not the previous 6. I found an adapter in amazon and voila! It worked. The system booted up nicely, all drivers auto installed and everything seemed stable (operating system, internet, videos, music etc; multiple applications). Happy days! However, as soon as I began to start any games my system would crash. It started with me getting 'no input signal' notifications on the screen and ended with me getting some kind of pseudo crash - i.e., the CPU was still working but the screen went black.

My first step was trawling the forums in which Solution (1) was removing the old drivers and installing the new ones. I tried this several times but was still getting the crashes. (2) I tried 4-5 GPU benchmark testers which simply crashed my GPU like the games almost instantly. (3) From the way the GPU was crashing I felt/thought it was the PSU (it seemed like it was power tripping as it was operating for long enough for there to be a temp issue).

Eventually I spent 2 hours online with an NVidia customer assistant remotely removing the drivers and installing them again. After trying to benchmark with one of their programs and failing he just flatly stated that the card was dead. I thanked him for his patience and assistance but did not feel satisfied with the response. I bought a multimeter to test the voltages of the PSU 750w and everything checked out. Speed fan and GPU-Z were not showing any unusual temperatures but I've gone ahead and bought some cooling gel for the GPU. I have also looked into 'bottle-necking' between motherboards and GPU's seen as my motherboard is ancient and the card relatively new by comparison so that's still a gray area for me at this stage of my investigative diagnostics.

Summary:

1. Ran through a complete uninstall of all graphics dirvers and cards with nvidia specialist online and re-install
of all latest drivers etc but card fails on starting games (instant crash).
2. ran Furmark, Valley GPUY tester and Nvidia agenst recommendation of Video Card stability test. These programs instantly
crash the card.
3. just checked the PSU with a multimeter and its still providing the correct voltages.
4. Going to run burnintest and see if there are any motherboard updates/issues.

I have also tried to under-clocking using MSI Afterburner but no joy except giving me a few extra seconds before crashing the benchmark testers.

Interesting valley benchmark worked with worked with my old radeon card but it crashed with furmark; with my new NVidia card both crash immediately.

After running these diagnostics I'm looking at 3 possible issues/avenues:

(1) someone mentioned the 'no signal' issue might simply be resolved by using a HDMI adapter - I'm not sure I understand how that could crash the card unless there was some kind of bottleneck feedback thing... but ill give it a go.

Alas, your GPU is not truly 'known good', only though to have last had 'no known issues'...correct? Perhaps someone else can test it in their rig to save you countless hours of troubleshooting what might only be a failing GPU?

Is your PSU of sufficient wattage? (Try a known good one, from someone you've heard of, of 500 watts or more)

Also, driver remnants concerns, going from Nvidia to AMD and/or back, can cause lingering issues...; one sure fire way to wipe out these lingering issues is a full format/reinstall with newest chipset and GPU driver packages...

Alas, your GPU is not truly 'known good', only though to have last had 'no known issues'...correct? Perhaps someone else can test it in their rig to save you countless hours of troubleshooting what might only be a failing GPU?

Is your PSU of sufficient wattage? (Try a known good one, from someone you've heard of, of 500 watts or more)

Also, driver remnants concerns, going from Nvidia to AMD and/or back, can cause lingering issues...; one sure fire way to wipe out these lingering issues is a full format/reinstall with newest chipset and GPU driver packages...

Still any stress testing is a like a system kill switch...

My hunch is POWER shortfall or instability.. I will sort that out before trying another system then get back to you..